Scope

NHS practitioners and managers are striving to provide high quality services. Thousands of improvement projects are run every year, but not all succeed. This scan examines research into what gets in the way of improvement in the NHS – because if we have a clear idea of what the barriers are, we are in a better position to consider solutions.

Purpose

The Health Foundation is interested in drawing together experience and evidence about the barriers and facilitators to improvement in the NHS so that future projects and policy making can reflect the best available knowledge. This evidence scan draws together published research about barriers to change to support this.

The key question that the scan seeks to address is:

  • What are the main barriers to implementing improvement projects in the NHS?

The focus is on barriers because this is a gap in knowledge. More work has focused on facilitators.

Barriers are defined as things that get in the way, slowing progress or stopping improvement programmes from succeeding. Examples may include lack of staffing, difficulties sharing information between IT systems and so on. It cannot be assumed that the opposite of a barrier will always be a facilitator.

For the purposes of the scan, improvement projects are defined as interventions that seek to improve NHS service delivery, organisation or ways of working. This is broader than interventions termed ‘quality improvement’ and incorporates wider change initiatives. However, it does not include service reconfiguration or structural or system-level interventions without a key focus on improving delivery or outcomes for service users.

Approach

The scan focused on readily available research published about the UK NHS. It was completed in November 2014.

To be eligible for inclusion in the scan, material had to:

  • include empirical data
  • be readily accessible in print or online
  • be about improvement in the NHS
  • include information about barriers to improvement
  • be published in the English language.

To identify relevant research, two reviewers independently searched 12 bibliographic databases for studies of any design. The databases comprised: Pubmed/Medline; Embase; Cinahl; PsychLit; the Cochrane Library and Controlled Trials Register; National Library for Health; Social Services Abstracts; TRIP; ASSIA; Health Business Elite; Google Scholar; and the Health Management Information Consortium. All databases were searched from their inception to the end of October 2014.

Combinations of search terms such as the following were used: NHS; improvement; change; innovation; adoption; barrier; constraint; challenge, feasibility, sustainability, embed; variability; implementation; diffusion; evaluation; health care; UK.

Abstract and title searches identified more than 4,000 articles about improvement in the NHS, though many were descriptive and did not contain empirical data. These articles were scanned and the full text of promising material was read. Only studies that explicitly included empirical material about barriers were eligible, so this excluded a number of broad studies about NHS projects.

In total, 73 empirical articles met the inclusion criteria.

In addition, more than 100 studies from other parts of the world were used to provide contextual information. Although the scan focused on the NHS, we wanted to understand whether barriers in the NHS were unique in any way so made comparisons with reviews and studies undertaken in other countries.

Findings were extracted from all publications using a template and themes were grouped according to the type of barriers identified.

The scan reports some brief examples of NHS improvement projects, but the focus is on drawing out trends and learning points, rather than the findings of individual studies.

All of the evidence was sourced and compiled systematically, but the scan is not a systematic review and does not seek to summarise every study about barriers to improvement in the NHS.

Studies included

Of the 73 studies, 53% focused on the hospital context, 16% focused on primary care and 30% looked at combined primary and secondary services or allied professions such as dentistry (see table 1).

Almost a third of the studies spanned multiple regions in England or were national (32%). The midlands and northern regions were slightly better represented than southern England. Studies were also available from Scotland, but there was little material from Wales or Northern Ireland.

Seven out of 10 studies had been published since 2010 (69%), perhaps suggesting more of a focus on identifying barriers in recent years.

Half of the studies were small cross-sectional designs (49%), meaning that they may not provide the most robust evidence (see table 2).

Table 1: Country and context of studies included in the scan

Primary care

Secondary care

Other eg combined, pharmacy, dental

Total number

Scotland

6

1

3

10

Northern Ireland

0

North England

3

7

5

15

Midlands

11

4

15

South England

2

7

9

England national /multiple regions

1

13

9

23

Wales

1

1

Total number

12

39

22

73

Table 2: Research design and ear of publication of studies included in the scan

Up to 1999

2000-2009

2010 onwards

Total number

Review

1

4

5

Randomised trial

2

2

Follow-up over time

10

10

Large cross-sectional study

6

14

20

Small corss-sectional study

4

11

21

36

Total number

4

18

51

73

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